At a low point in his career, pressed by need and uncertainty, Vonnegut encountered his old Cornell classmate Knox Burger, now an editor at Dell, at a New York cocktail party. Burger asked whether Vonnegut had any ideas for a marketable novel....

On January 12, 1944, German soldiers transported 150 American prisoners of war, including Private Kurt Vonnegut, from Stalag IV-B in Mühlberg to Dresden, thirty miles to the south.. In Dresden, Vonnegut would witness first-hand the most destructive aerial bombing of the war....To read more, click here

THREE CLASSIC NOVELSSo It Goes: The Unconventional Sci-Fi of Kurt Vonnegut

In the early 1930s, H.G. Wells visited General Electric's research laboratories in Schenectady, a facility dubbed the House of Magic by GE’s public relations department. Here the famous authorwas hosted by Nobel Prize-winning chemistIrving Langmuir, who suggested an idea for astory to Wells....